Credit Suisse has hired a senior managing director from Swiss rival UBS to its new-look leveraged finance team in Europe, which, according to one banker, remains on course for its “best year ever”.

Alison Howe, a senior MD with UBS's leveraged finance team, will take up a similar role with Credit Suisse in the coming weeks, according to people familiar with the matter. She will focus exclusively on corporates, one of the people said.

Credit Suisse merged its leveraged finance and sponsors teams in 2013 and has been adding to the group under the leadership of Didier Denat and Mathew Cestar in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Denat said: “We’ve had a tremendous year so far – it’s probably going to be our best year ever.”

Investment banking revenues from European leverage finance stand at $3.7 billion so far this year, on a par with the same period last year.

Credit Suisse is fourth in the European leveraged finance revenue ranking, with $221 million in fees — down slightly on last year. It sits fifth in Dealogic’s rankings for financial sponsor revenues in Europe so far this year, with $201 million in fees.

The bank plans to increase the number of managing directors in the team to nine by the end of the year.

Earlier this month, Cestar said: “We are continuing to invest in our leveraged finance franchise in a considered and strategic way at a time when issuance volumes are growing strongly and many companies are requiring access to the capital markets for the first time.”

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Hires at MD level this year include Matthew Grinnell, the former head of sponsors in Europe at Barclays, who joined earlier in the summer as a senior relationship banker for some of Credit Suisse’s key private equity accounts.

Other recent additions at director level include David Savage, who joined in May, and Luis Vitores, who will join in November, based in Madrid. Vitores joins from Barclays and will be responsible for the origination of transactions for Spanish corporates.

At UBS, Howe is the second senior departure from the leverage finance group this month after Giles Borten, ex-head of leverage finance and co-head of DCM in Emea at the Swiss bank, left “to seek new opportunities outside the firm”, according to a UBS memo seen by Financial News. It is not yet clear who will replace Borten.